If you’ve visited Norwich cathedral you’ll probably have seen a pelican in Norfolk. Not a common sight, and indeed the ones in the cathedral are inanimate artworks, and most are not realistic. The hope is that we may soon have an opportunity to see these remarkable birds in the flesh in rewilded parts of Norfolk.
It is a “Massive pelican with a dishevelled appearance.” The eBird website is not particularly flattering to the Dalmatian pelican and its curly nape feathers (in French, rather more charmingly, un pélican frisé). And it is these dishevelled immigrants that Norfolk is looking forward to welcoming.
An unlikely looking bird
“A wonderful bird is the pelican,” the American poet Dixon Lanier Merritt (1897–1972) famously observed, “his bill will hold more than his belican.” The profile is unmistakable, and the way a pelican swallows a fish is a source of fascination for young and old.
Dalmatian pelicans, as the name suggests, are found in the northern Mediterranean, in the greatest numbers in northern Greece at Little Prespa Lake. They are also present in many other places in central and southern Europe and Asia, flying gracefully on their 3m-wide wingspan over wetlands, rivers and estuaries where they forage for food, scooping up fish but also small amphibians and reptiles in their spectacular bills.
When pelicans inhabited the wetlands of East Anglia
The 1086 Domesday Book records that the Great Fen, between central England and East Anglia, was home to “such quantities of fish as to cause astonishment in strangers”. In Ely, an island at the time, eels were used as currency. A perfect environment for pelicans.
Fossils show that pelicans bred here until the middle ages. By the mid 17th century, however, a group of wealthy landowners had commissioned the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to undertake extensive drainage work to make the area usable for cultivation. This work, the increasing human population encroaching on their habitat, and the appetising prospect of a bird weighing over 10kg, combined to ensure that the species gradually died out.
… and when they might make a return
Rewilding Britain is providing seed funding to a project via its Innovation Fund to foster the return of these magnificent birds to Norfolk. The project involves working with landowners on the extensive wetland rewilding required, and collaborating with a Dutch reintroduction project to learn about the best way to establish a breeding colony in England. Rewilding on the Danube Delta, for example, has led to a successful reintroduction of the Dalmatian pelican, where the species protects the region’s biodiversity. Tourists are also drawn by the pelicans, incidentally boosting the local economy, though their activities need careful management to avoid disturbance to the birds.
So the noisy clattering of pelican beaks, part of their elaborate courtship ritual, may in due course be heard once more in Norfolk. The large areas of shallow water that make up the Broads, and the extensive reedbeds, are the kind of environment that the pelicans favour. Nests are built on islands or on reedbeds, and the pelican pairs, who bond for life, return to the same breeding site year after year. The colony is social, and breeding sites can contain dozens of nests.
As a further benefit to the Broads, the rewilding required for the pelicans would provide a favourable environment for other endangered species, such as the cheeky cuckoo (maybe not so popular?) and the elegant black-tailed godwit, already resident further west in our region.
Why pelicans in the cathedral?
“The Pelican in her Piety” is one of the oldest traditional symbols for Christ, and is widely found in medieval religious art. George Ryan explains that “The origins of this symbolism trace back to the Physiologus, a 2nd-century Christian text from Alexandria. According to legend, in times of famine, a mother pelican would strike her breast to feed her starving chicks with her own blood, sacrificing herself to give them life. Early Christians saw a clear parallel to Christ’s Passion: just as the pelican gives her blood to save her children, Christ pours out His blood on the Cross and in the Eucharist to redeem humanity.” He offers as a possible explanation that “pelicans press their large bills against their chests to empty their pouches, creating the impression of piercing their own flesh.”
The Norwich cathedral pelicans illustrated here date from the late 14th century (the lectern) and the mid-15th century (the pew end carving on the dean’s stall). One might ask why, if pelicans were present in East Anglia at the time, the pelicans were not more faithfully and realistically made. Were the pelicans so shy that no one got near enough to see them properly? Was it only the eel fishers who ever saw them? Well, possibly. Maybe the artists who created the cathedral’s pelicans had only (possibly mangled) verbal descriptions to rely on?
Most important, probably, was that medieval art was far more governed by symbol than by realism: in a human scene the most important person was often disproportionately larger than the others represented. Many of the artworks we know of showing the pelican in her piety look remarkably like the Norwich lectern – a recognisable symbol was more important than any realism.
Yet maybe the spikes on the lectern pelican’s head are nevertheless an attempt at realism. Are they in fact a tidied-up representation of the live Dalmatian pelican’s dishevelled appearance? I, for one, am looking forward to making the comparison.
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